ENGLISH AND AMERICAN FARM MACHINERY.

Globe, Volume XXII, Issue 1878, 1 March 1880, Page 3

ENGLISH AND AMERICAN FARM MACHINERY.

[“Scribner’s Monthly.”] American manufacturers of farm tools shape them in such a way as to do the work with the least physical labour. The English manufacturer, on the other hand, has a pride in making everything substantial, heavy, and solid, without any regard to the weight or strength needed. Why, there is more wood and iron in an English farm cart than would make two American carts, and yet, with their superb roads, they load theirs no heavier than we do ours. An English manure fork is of the same size and pattern it was half a century ago —a square, rough tine, shouldered near the point —calling for the greatest amount of force in loading or unloading. The American fork is a round, polished tine, tapering gradually from the point to the base, and calling for the least power. The weight of an English plough is at least three times that of ours, and its length about twice, and yet it takes neither wider nor deeper furrow slices than our best ploughs. In fact, one pair of horses attached to one of our best pattern ploughs will do from a third to a half more work in the same number of hours than an English farmer with his long unwieldy pattern, that is out of all proportion, both in length and weight, to the work it is intended for. The same is true of the English harrows, cultivators, and all of the implements I found in common use for turning or cultivating the soil. The ordinary wooden handrake is a clumsy, heavy thing, having from a third to a half more wood than is actually necessary. In many instances, in going through England, I have counted eight and ten hands gathering hay into windrows with these hand rakes, an operation very seldom, if ever, seen now in the United States. In many of the agricultural districts which I visited, farmers cultivating from forty to a hundred acres of land still continue to cut their grain crops with the reaping hook and cradle. The English cradle hag a scythe-blade of ordinary size and length, with two short wooden fingers. The man cutting with this cradle throws the cut grain around against the uncut standing grain. Another man follows the cradler, equipped with a piece of stick about three feet in length with an iron hook on the end of it, and gathers the cut grain into sheafs and places them on the stubble before the next swath can be out. The American, or what is commonly called the “ Yankee,” cradle has a wide scythe-blade similar in size and length to the English, but instead of two short fingers it has four long ones, and the operator cuts the grain, which falls on the fingers and which is thrown into a sheaf on the stubble, entirely out of the way of the cradler who follows, leaving the cut grain ready to be bound, one man with ns doing the work of two in England. In talking on the subject with an intelligent farmer in Essex County, England, I had a difficulty in convincing him that the long fingers of the “Yankee ” cradle would not or could not gat tangled up in the straw, nor could I indue him to send and get an American cradle although he was complaining of the high prioi of farm labor when compared with the low price of farm produce.